Firstly, it was 90% lawyers with blogs, so these were very smart people. Secondly, for the most part they had no clue about how to make money with their blogs. They do it for the passion of it. They write about legal topics because that's where their interest lies.
Their biggest problem is that they avoid putting simple advertising like adsense on their blog because they don't want to be perceived as being associated with any of the advertisements that come up. They also have some fears of fee splitting. Everyone wants to be able to justify the time they're putting into their blog, but nobody wants to use the traditional methods of monetizing a site.
They have great content. They have good pagerank. They have zero dollars! I tried in vain to suggest ways they can monetize their time investment, but I don't think I got through to very many of them. It's not for a lack of intelligence, because these were very smart people, but rather a lack of Internet and SEO knowledge.
Here's the key. Put up a separate site to make money on. Whether it's an affiliate site, membership site, ebook, or retail site - doesn't matter, you just need to sell something. Then, point keyword loaded links to it from your well trafficked, well respected blog. Start another blog, and point links from that one as well... publish a few articles, with links. That's basically what SEO is all about these days anyway.
Then, you have the capability to make money with your integrity intact, without running ads, and without worrying about fee splitting. Plus, you can rationalize all the time you put into your blog(s) as SEO for your $$ site.
Anyway - Chicago is great! I walked around for a while downtown with my friend Candice and explored a beautiful city. I'll definitely be back there again...
TG
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>> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary and those that don't.
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